Last week I was extremely busy working on the VI(vSphere) Java API 3.0 (codename: Crescendo) whose main theme to support the next release of vSphere. To my surprise, I caught on an API that should have been included in vSphere Java API 2.1 but somehow omitted. Even surprised to me is that no one has reported to me via our sourceforge.net tracker.

The distributed virtual switch introduced in vSphere 4 has many benefits over the traditional switch. For one thing, you no longer have possible glitches with live migrating virtual machines from one host to another using traditional switches, and all your port settings go with your virtual machines.

If you have virtual machines using traditional switches, you can easily move them to new distributed virtual switches. The rest of this article explains how to achieve this.

If you are familiar with social media or research papers, you must know tagging already – You use keywords to label an entity, be it a blog post, an article, or something else, so that it can be easily searched out. So it’s a very useful feature in managing information.

In vSphere 4.0, VMware added tagging capabilities to the managed entities. According to the API reference of 4.1, it’s still an experimental feature and Read more...

There was recently a question in the open source VI Java API forum regarding the OptionManager. As you may have known, the OptionManager is used to manage key value pairs, for example, the “VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking” is a key as shown in the code included in the question. Somehow the code to set the key, as shown below, doesn’t work with com.vmware.vim25.InvalidArgument exception. Read more...

After publishing the tech talk slides, I am happy to announce that the record is ready now. If you have missed the onsite or online session, or simply want to watch it again, please feel free to click here. Note that you will need Adobe Flash 10.1 or higher to view the recording.

Many thanks to my colleague Luke Kilpatrick (@lkilpatrick) for helping with online streaming and recording, and Matt Dhuyvetter for setting up the top quality audio feeds!

Recently I stumbled at a book Things That Make Us Smart by one of my favorite authors Donald Norman. In the book, he shared many insights on the complex human machine interactions, “arguing for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than minds that must conform to the machine.” By the way, I highly recommend his another book The Design of Everyday Things.

Because I just blogged about IT automation, I still have that topic on my mind. So when I read the book, I did quite a lot of reflective thinking around IT automation. In general, I feel Read more...

Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a powerful (powerless, really) feature can reduce host power consumption in a DRS cluster. It works in either manual mode or automatic mode only when DRS is enabled. DPM can place idle hosts into standby mode, or awaken them from standby when more resources are needed.

In business world, we hear frequently the word “focus.” To achieve business goals, for example, deliver software, it’s absolutely necessary to focus on the projects and priorities. Teams that focus on execution typically perform better than others that don’t.

It’s, however, not a good idea to focus all the time. In fact, human beings have limited period of attention. Passing that period hurts one’s effectiveness – one explanation, perhaps, for why long working hours don’t deliver proportional results – not to mention the detrimental effects on one’s health.

This is the wrapping tech talk at our last community meetup by Jeff Hu who is the tech lead on vSphere APIs. Based on his 7 years of experience since the inception of vSphere API, Jeff shared his insights on the design of vSphere API, and what can be done for better ease of use and consistency. In my opinion, this is a must read for anyone who is interested in VMware management APIs.

Disclaimer: The presentation contains forwardlooking, exploratory ideas and should not be interpreted as a statement of official product direction by VMware. Read more...

This talk is by Dave Briccetti (@dcbriccetti) who is an independent consultant working at VMware on vCloud related project. He is also a committer on the Lift framework for building Web applications in Scala.

This is by Boris Strongin, VP Engineering and Co-founder, Hytrust Inc at our first community meetup on May 18. He reviews new security, auditing, and compliance challenges coming with cloud multi-tenancy, and approaches to address them.

This is the tech talk by Giridhar Padmanabh(@girip26), who is now a Sr. Manager at Cisco. He joined Cisco not long ago with the newScale acquisition. This tech talk draws on his 7 years of experience at newScale building industry leading software for delivering private cloud as a service.

We had a great community meetup last Wednesday. Check out this post for the photos. Thanks to the speakers, we have the tech talks slides ready for you. If you have missed the event last week, just check out these slides in PDF format. At the same time, we are working to make the recording available. So stay tuned for announcement.

Here is the talk is by me. I reviewed the history, current state, and future road map of the open source vSphere Java API. In the end, I also shared 3 success factors for Read more...

Weeks ago I had a great conversation with Vanessa Alvarez (@VanessaAlvarez1) who is an analyst with Forrest Research. Among other topics, we discussed datacenter automation because we’re both interested in it. After Vanessa tweeted about her automation dream, several follow-up tweets came up.

In general, I think automation is a vague word in IT world, and it mostly means different things to different people. This is especially true when we talk about automation together with integration. This article tries to define automation from my understanding and perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts in comments.

My colleague John Troyer (@jtroyer), who hosts VMware Communities Roundtable, has posted an interview with Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and me about our thoughts on VMware SDKs, APIs, and CLIs on May 18. During the interview, I answered questions about the open source vSphere Java APIs, the themes of my blogs (why it’s called doubecloud), what I am doing now at VMware, and of course our first community meetup event on the same day. If you have missed the session, you can listen to it now: , or here. Read more...

Our first community meetup event on Wednesday night was a great success. It attracted about 200 developers/QAs and administrators globally either on site or online with live streaming. An EMC development team flied all the way from Irvine to join us; so did Huawei Symantec from Chengdu of China.

At the end of the meetup, we gave way 20 copies of these books: VMware VI and vSphere SDK by me, VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1) by Duncan Epping, VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf, andVMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment of Virtualization Servers (2nd Edition) by Edward Haletky; and many gadgets.

We know our attendees took their personal time mainly not Read more...

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My company has created products like vSearch ("Super vCenter"), vijavaNG APIs, EAM APIs, ICE tool. We also help clients with virtualization and cloud computing on customized development, training. Should you, or someone you know, need these products and services, please feel free to contact me: steve __AT__ doublecloud.org.

Me: Steve Jin, VMware vExpert who authored the VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall, and created the de factor open source vSphere Java API while working at VMware engineering. Companies like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, VMware, are among the users of the API and other tools I developed for their products, internal IT orchestration, and test automation.